80,551 research outputs found
Student Teaching and Research Laboratory Focusing on Brain-computer Interface Paradigms - A Creative Environment for Computer Science Students -
This paper presents an applied concept of a brain-computer interface (BCI)
student research laboratory (BCI-LAB) at the Life Science Center of TARA,
University of Tsukuba, Japan. Several successful case studies of the student
projects are reviewed together with the BCI Research Award 2014 winner case.
The BCI-LAB design and project-based teaching philosophy is also explained.
Future teaching and research directions summarize the review.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, accepted for EMBC 2015, IEEE copyrigh
Arena: A General Evaluation Platform and Building Toolkit for Multi-Agent Intelligence
Learning agents that are not only capable of taking tests, but also
innovating is becoming a hot topic in AI. One of the most promising paths
towards this vision is multi-agent learning, where agents act as the
environment for each other, and improving each agent means proposing new
problems for others. However, existing evaluation platforms are either not
compatible with multi-agent settings, or limited to a specific game. That is,
there is not yet a general evaluation platform for research on multi-agent
intelligence. To this end, we introduce Arena, a general evaluation platform
for multi-agent intelligence with 35 games of diverse logics and
representations. Furthermore, multi-agent intelligence is still at the stage
where many problems remain unexplored. Therefore, we provide a building toolkit
for researchers to easily invent and build novel multi-agent problems from the
provided game set based on a GUI-configurable social tree and five basic
multi-agent reward schemes. Finally, we provide Python implementations of five
state-of-the-art deep multi-agent reinforcement learning baselines. Along with
the baseline implementations, we release a set of 100 best agents/teams that we
can train with different training schemes for each game, as the base for
evaluating agents with population performance. As such, the research community
can perform comparisons under a stable and uniform standard. All the
implementations and accompanied tutorials have been open-sourced for the
community at https://sites.google.com/view/arena-unity/
Delivering elder-care environments utilizing TV-channel based mechanisms
In this paper, we present a smart environment for elderly. What makes the development of such system challenging is that the concept of smartness for elderly brings to the extreme the idea of invisibility of the technology. In our experience, elders are well-disposed to new technologies, provided that those will not require significant changes - namely, they are invisible - to their habits. Starting from this consideration, 200 caregivers responses were collected by questionnaire, so as to better understand elders' needs and habits. A system was subsequently developed allowing elders to access a number of "modern web services" as standard TV channels: at channel 43 there is the health status, at channel 45 the photos of the family, at 46 the agenda of the week, just to mention few of the available services. The content of such services is automatically generated by the smart devices in the environment and is managed by the caregivers (e.g., family members) by simple web apps. Fourteen families were asked to install the system in their house. The results of these experiments confirm that the proposed system is considered effective and user-friendly by elders
Enabling collaboration in virtual reality navigators
In this paper we characterize a feature superset for Collaborative
Virtual Reality Environments (CVRE), and derive a component
framework to transform stand-alone VR navigators into full-fledged
multithreaded collaborative environments. The contributions of our
approach rely on a cost-effective and extensible technique for
loading software components into separate POSIX threads for
rendering, user interaction and network communications, and adding a
top layer for managing session collaboration. The framework recasts
a VR navigator under a distributed peer-to-peer topology for scene
and object sharing, using callback hooks for broadcasting remote
events and multicamera perspective sharing with avatar interaction.
We validate the framework by applying it to our own ALICE VR
Navigator. Experimental results show that our approach has good
performance in the collaborative inspection of complex models.Postprint (published version
Exploring the Use of Virtual Worlds as a Scientific Research Platform: The Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA)
We describe the Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA), the
first professional scientific organization based exclusively in virtual worlds
(VWs). The goals of MICA are to explore the utility of the emerging VR and VWs
technologies for scientific and scholarly work in general, and to facilitate
and accelerate their adoption by the scientific research community. MICA itself
is an experiment in academic and scientific practices enabled by the immersive
VR technologies. We describe the current and planned activities and research
directions of MICA, and offer some thoughts as to what the future developments
in this arena may be.Comment: 15 pages, to appear in the refereed proceedings of "Facets of Virtual
Environments" (FaVE 2009), eds. F. Lehmann-Grube, J. Sablating, et al., ICST
Lecture Notes Ser., Berlin: Springer Verlag (2009); version with full
resolution color figures is available at
http://www.mica-vw.org/wiki/index.php/Publication
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